VICTORIA — Opposition leader Adrian Dix is scheduled to deliver a speech this weekend before the governing council of the New Democratic Party, followed by what is expected to be a lengthy question and answer session on the election campaign.

An accountability session, they’re calling it, though I’ve heard less-flattering descriptions too. One jokester dubbed it a “self-criticism session,” after the harrowing confessionals-cum-ritual-humiliations that were a staple of the Maoist left.

Dix, with wry understatement, says only that he wishes he had a “more positive” report to deliver and does not expect his performance to be spared in the inevitable post mortem.

The latter is the other order of business for the weekend as the 100 plus member council — the elected party executive plus representatives of all 85 riding associations — weighs a more in depth review of the lessons to be learned from Campaign 2013.

Several possibilities are already on display in comments from various NDP worthies. None are sparing of Dix or his hand-picked election team.

“It was simply a badly designed, mismanaged campaign,” says Doug McArthur, who served alongside Dix in the premier’s office of Glen Clark, and now teaches in the public policy school at Simon Fraser University.

“You should follow the best practices for good campaigns — whether you’re ahead or behind or wherever you are,” he told me during an interview last week on Voice of B.C. on Shaw TV. “But if you run a really bad campaign and the other side is good — and the Liberals are very good, and they deserve full credit for that, and Christy Clark gave the campaign managers room to run a campaign — you’re going to lose.”

Party president Moe Sihota, whose own future is on the line, has already admitted that the NDP’s legendary get out the vote machinery failed this time. “Fear, I think, motivated a lot of their people to show up and complacency resulted in us not getting the kind of turnout we needed to win,” he told the Victoria Times Colonist in a morning-after-the-debacle interview. “There were a lot of NDP voters who didn’t come out and vote.”

Dix, who hasn’t lost the touch for a self-deprecating anecdote, tells of meeting two folks on public transit after the election. Told him they were disappointed he didn’t win. Outcome surprised them too, because they’d not got around to voting for the NDP, thinking the party had it in the bag.

One of those moments, one has to think, where some anger management training would come in handy.

Then there’s the NDP’s quick-tempered John Horgan, who in his morning-after reaction, blamed the party’s decision to accentuate the positive. “You get full marks for that, but you don’t get to form the government.”

He’s since made clear that he shares responsibility. “I think we could have been more pointed in our criticisms of 12 years of Liberal government,” he recently told Jonathan Fowlie of The Vancouver Sun. “I bought in completely to the plan of the campaign, and I’m as at fault as anyone with its deployment. It’s not about pointing fingers.”

Harry Lali, defeated MLA for Fraser Nicola, has not hesitated to point his finger at Dix for the mid-campaign flip-flop where he denounced the proposed twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline after earlier vowing to give the project serious consideration.

“When the announcement about the Kinder Morgan pipeline was made, it basically decimated Interior and northern B.C. for us — rural B.C. basically,” Lali told the Sun’s Fowlie recently. “You can’t be against (Enbridge’s) Northern Gateway, you can’t be against Site C, you can’t be against Kinder Morgan and all of that because the message from the blue-collar worker is: ‘Those are my jobs. I’m in construction, I need that job.’’

Interesting to note the complaints that don’t figure all that prominently. The NDP didn’t lack for resources this campaign. Dix, in particular, deserves credit for a remarkable breakthrough in fundraising with the business community. And with most news organizations predicting an NDP win, there’s little basis for complaining that the media didn’t give the party a fair shake this time.

That still leaves ample room for recriminations. But the bigger challenge is how to get beyond this fiasco and build for the future. Horgan again: “My party has to take a good look at our soul and say, ‘What are we? Are we a perpetual opposition party or are we going to be putting forward a platform that people are excited about and vote in favour of?’”

That kind of talk has him on the short list of candidates for next leader presuming the job becomes vacant. Mike Farnworth, who finished ahead of Horgan and behind Dix in the last leadership, would surely be a candidate as well.

Dix, for all of the fingerprints he left on the corpse of this campaign, would like another shot at it, and it probably needs serious pushing to get him to vacate the post sooner rather than later.

The first test will be whether the provincial council can approve tough, forward-looking terms of reference for the review and an overseer well separated from this year’s fiasco. Otherwise the exercise will have less to do with learning from the last electoral defeat than resetting the stage for losing the next one.

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Vaughn Palmer: Dix to face NDP council this weekend for election post mortem

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